>>Welcome to this IBM Watson health client conversation here. We're probing the dynamics of the relationship between IBM and its clients. And we're looking back, we're exploring the present situation and discussing the future state of healthcare. My name is Dave Volante from the cube and with me are Alex Dillard. Who's a senior director data analysis at blue choice, blue choice health plan, and Darryl decode, who is IBM with IBM Watson health. Of course. Welcome gentlemen. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Hey, >>So, you know, you think about lasting relationships. They're the foundation to any partnership and this past year, and it's tested all of us. We've had to rely on both personal and professional relationships to get us through the pandemic. So Alex, let me start with you. How has the partnership with IBM supported you in 2020? >>Well, uh, I've just a piece of a larger puzzle. Uh, the relationship that Darrell and I have had is confined to IBM Watson health, but blue cross blue shield, South Carolina, which food choice is a wholly owned subsidiary of has had a standing relationship with IBM on the it side. Uh, we are a mainframe shop, uh, about 70% of our it infrastructure is on a mainframe. And, uh, that puts us as a segment one client for IBM, we're in the top 300 of all of their clients in the Americans. And more specifically we're the fourth largest, um, uh, Linux on Z shop in the world. So, uh, we've got a lot of diversification at blue cross blue shield of South Carolina and the mainframe and the vastness of that. It infrastructure reflects that, uh, diversification. We are more than just a crossing the shield. Uh, that's typically what people think of is insurance when they think of crossing shield, but we also have a division that does a lot of subcontract work for government programs, uh, track air, which is the military healthcare, uh, claims processing and Medicare claims processing. >>We were a subcontractor of other folks that use our back office, it infrastructure to, to run their claims through. So that's, that's the larger, um, aspect of our relationship that, that blue cross blue shield of South Carolina house with IBM, uh, as it relates to Watson health, we have been a client since 1994 and obviously that predates the IBM proper. Uh, we were a client of med stat and then Truven, who then, uh, was bought by IBM. So we have used the products from Watson health throughout our system to support provider profiling, uh, count group reporting, um, and ad hoc analysis and to some extent to, uh, support our value-based products with, uh, ACO and PCMH, >>Uh, products. >>Awesome. Thank you for that. So Daryl is very long-term relationship. Obviously, if people forget sometimes that, uh, how IBM has modernized the Z Alex talked about, uh, Linux on the mainframe. That's pretty cool. I wonder if you could talk about specifically the things that, that you've done with Alex in his, in his, in his team, you know, thinking back last year, what were your accomplishments that you really stand out? >>Yeah, so, so one thing that jumps to mind is, uh, given the long standing relationship, I relied heavily on Alex to help us work through a multi-year renewal. And it was, it was a, um, a good adventure for us. We, we were able to laugh along the way. We certainly had some, some phone calls that, that were a little bit challenging, but the great thing about it was that the relationship that Alex and I had, he really views it as a partnership. And that was just so encouraging and uplifting. So to me, from my perspective, that was absolutely, uh, one of the highlights of my year and working through even through the pandemic and all that, we figured it out. >>So you guys, when you get together, go ahead, please. >>That's what I had as well. Um, you know, the, the unique thing about the Watson health contract is because it involves data. Uh, we take the stance that it's an it contract, so I'm on the business side. So I've got to just, as Daryl has to navigate it with me, we've got to navigate a large of your it bureaucracy. Um, and, uh, it, it was challenging. Um, you know, the business people kind of smooth the tracks and then you get the lawyers involved in, it just goes haywire. So, um, we were able to navigate that. Um, uh, so yeah, so it was a big accomplishment. So Alex, it's not real sexy to talk about, but we got it done >>Well. So Alex you're, you're in sales, so you're, you're used to role playing. So imagine you're, you're, you're sitting down, uh, sorry, Darryl. You're used to, role-playing out. Imagine you're sitting down with Alex and you're thinking about 20, 21 planning, so, you know, take it away. W what do you, what would you ask, what would you talk about or share with us? >>Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, so I, I know that, you know, one of the key objectives is, uh, continued to ingest, engage with your members and you have key business strategies. I know you recently migrated over to a new PBM, and so there, there's some complexities that come with that. Um, but just, you know, Alex, if you don't mind, why don't you share a little bit about kind of your, your perspective on what 2020 would hold for you in your organization? Well, I think that due to the pandemic, we are, I personally kick the, can down the road on a couple of things, particularly >>Having a strategic roadmap discussion, um, you know, uh, I was going to get into this later, but I enjoy doing things face-to-face rather than, uh, over the phone or, or virtually. And so, uh, I guess I was a little too optimistic about maybe being able to get together late 2020 to have that strategic roadmap discussion. Um, I think, uh, given what has developed with, um, the pandemic and vaccines and stuff, I may, I may be able to get everybody on the same page later this year, hopefully. Uh, but certainly we want to have a strategic roadmap discussion. Um, we license, uh, Watson Hills, uh, cat group insights, uh, tool, which we use for employer group reporting. And we are currently in the beginning stages of rolling that out to our external clients, whether it's agents, brokers, um, those types of folks. And then it vanished we as our core product that we use for analysis, and that product is transitioning to what is called health insights. And so from an analytical standpoint, my staff and the staff of our cluster areas will need to sort of move to health insights since that's where it's going, uh, from an analytic standpoint. So we're going to work on that as well. Um, and then some more detailed things around database rebuilds and stuff like that. Those are all sort of on the roadmap for 2021. >>Yeah. So, you know, you talk about strategic planning and you think about the way planning used to be. I mean, sometimes you take a longer term horizon, maybe that's five years, you know, technology cycles, you know, even though they go very fast, but you see major technology shifts, they're like go through these seven year cycles, you see that in financial world. And then with the, with the pandemic, we're talking about seven day cycles, you know, how do I support people work from home? Do I open the store or not? You know, it's a day-to-day type of thing. So I wonder if you could each talk about personally and professionally w how, how is 2020, you know, changed you and maybe position you for, for what's ahead, maybe Alex, you could start, >>Well, you know, I'm an analyst, so I always fall back to the numbers. What are the numbers show us, um, you know, people can have four perceptions, but, uh, the numbers give us a reality. So the reality is that a year ago, pre pandemic, uh, just 13% of blue cross blue shield employees were working from home a hundred percent, uh fast-forward to today. And that number is now 87%. So think about, uh, just the lift from a it infrastructure to support that we almost, all of those people are using Citrix to get in to our network. Uh, we're using a remote desktop. So you've got this pipeline that probably had to go from, you know, this small, to huge, to get all this bandwidth, all this data and everything. So you've got that huge lift. Um, and then it affects different areas, um, differently. Uh, I don't have any first-line staff, any staff that are member facing, so I didn't really have to navigate, you know, how do these people talk to our member? >>How does staff talk to our members on the phone when they're at home, as opposed to in the office, and, you know, is there background noise, things like that. So I've got analysts, uh, they're just crunching numbers. Um, but my, my, my personal, uh, feeling was I like doing managing by walking around, you know, stopping and talking to other, working on. So that went away and I like face-to-face meetings, as I've mentioned, and that went away. So it was really a culture change for me personally, it was a culture change for our organization. Uh, and, and now we're having conversations with executive management that, you know, if you've got staff who have been doing a good job and they remain productive, you know, give me a reason they got to come back in, which is just, as you told me that I'm going to be the case a year ago, I would have been, you know, flabbergasted, but that's where we are right now. >>And so on a personal standpoint, you know, I went home for a little while and then came back. And so my wife also works for blue cross blue shield of South Carolina. Um, so, you know, she set up in the dining room working, uh, I have my own book in our living room working, and then we've got a great side, you know, the school is not in session, you know, in person. So he's doing virtual learning. So combine all those things, and you've got all kinds of crazy things that could happen. Uh, and then you've got staff who are in the same situation. Um, so it was a lot to handle. And the longer it goes on the novelty of working from home wears off, and you kind of realize, you know, I can't go do this. I can't go out to eat. I can't do all types of things that I used to do. And so that affects your mental health. So as, as a leader, um, of my small area, and then our executives really had to become more, uh, uh, in, in people's faces. So we've got, we've done a lot more video, uh, messages, a lot more emails. Um, I have been tasked with being very deliberate about checking on how everything is going at their house. Are they getting what they need? Um, you know, how are they feeling? Are they getting up and exercising, all those things that you took for granted, uh, beforehand. >>Yeah. So Daryl, anything you'd add to that in terms of specifically in terms of how you might, how you might change the way in which you interact with your clients generally, uh, an Alex specifically, Alex likes, face to face, you know, we can't wait. All right. >>Yeah, yeah. It's funny. We never quite got to do it Alex, but we were talking about doing a virtual happy hour at one point too, to just celebrate the success. Um, but for me, you know, typically I would travel and visit Alex face-to-face on maybe a monthly basis. And so it it's been really hard for me. I didn't realize how, how much I enjoyed that in-person interaction. And so that, that was something that I I've been, you know, working through and finding ways to, to still interact with people. And I'm certainly making, making the best of, of the video phone calls and, you know, that sort of thing. So, uh, just work working to maintain those relationships. >>I wonder if I could ask you when, when, when this thing, when we're through the pandemic, what do you expect the work from home percentage? I think I heard 13% prior to the pandemic, 87% today. What do you think is going to be post pandemic? >>That is a good question. Um, it, it may go back to maybe 60% at home. I think, I think there will be a simple majority, uh, working from home. Um, that's, that's from our planning, uh, space planning standpoint. That's, that's what we are, uh, what we're expecting, um, if, if production stays, um, at acceptable levels, um, >>Do you feel like productivity was negatively impacted positive? It will be impacted or it's kind of weird. >>Yeah. All the metrics that we track show that it was, it was sustained and in some areas even better. Uh, and if you really think about, um, sort of your typical day when you work from home, I found, uh, that I was logged on an hour earlier. That's probably what's happening with other staff as well is they're, they're motivated to get up and, and get online, uh, earlier. >>Yeah. Mostly tech leaders that I talk to share that sentiment, that the productivity is actually improved. So Darryl, I presume you see the same thing in your observation space. Yeah. >>Yeah. I, I do. And, and I have other clients too, and, and, and they are definitely looking at ways to continue to work remotely. I know that for a lot of people who are in the office all the time, uh, having a little bit more flexibility when you work from home can be a good thing. And, and like you said, you, you have to make sure that the productivity is still there and the productivity is up. Um, but I, I could see that the trend continuing absolutely >>I'd love for you to, to look at Darryl and say, and tell him what the kinds of things that IBM can do to help you both today, immediately 20, 21, and in the future and a Darryl, how, how your, how you'll respond. >>Well, I'll tell you that. Um, so in 2020, what, what changed most dramatically for us as a health plan? Uh, and, and I, it echoes what we see across the country is the gigantic shift in telehealth. Um, you know, if, if, again, if you look at the numbers, uh, our telehealth visits per thousand, so that's the number of visits per thousand members in a given month, went up 1472%. And so, you know, the common response to that is, well, you know, your visits overall probably, you know, were flat because, uh, you know, they just weren't happening in that. And that's not necessarily true for us. So if you look at visits overall, they written down four and a half percent. Um, so there was a shift, but it, it was not a big enough shift to account for, uh, visits overall sustaining the level that they were pre pandemic. >>Um, so as we look into 2021, uh, we will be investigating how we can maintain, uh, the, uh, the accessibility of our healthcare providers via telehealth. Um, you know, one of the projects that we started in 2020, uh, was based upon the choosing wisely campaign. So if you're not familiar with choosing wisely, it's a very well thought out process. It involves many, many provider specialties and its sole target is to reduce low value care. Uh, so we took it upon ourselves to Institute sort of a mirror of that plan or that program at, at blue cross here in South Carolina. And so as we moved to 2021, obviously those low value services just because of the pandemic were reduced, uh, and some of the high-value care was reduced as well. And so what we are going to try to do is bring back habit, bring back that high value care, but not bring back that low value care and so low value care or things like vitamin D testing. Uh, it can be other things like, um, uh, CT for head headaches, um, imaging for low abdominal pain, things like that. So, uh, we want to focus on low, uh, eliminating what value care, bringing back high value care, >>Okay, Dale, you're up? How are you going to help Alex achieve that? So, so good news is, is that we've got the analytic warehouse and the database where all of the data is captured. And so we we've got the treasure trove of information and data. And so what we'll do is we'll come alongside Alex and his team will do the analytics, we'll provide the analytic methods measures, and we'll also help him uncover where perhaps those individuals may be, who had postponed care, um, because of the pandemic. And so we can put together strategies to help make sure that they get the care that they need. Uh, I also a hundred percent agree that tele-health hopefully is something that will continue because I do think that that is a good way and efficient way to get care for people. Um, and, you know, as a, as, as a way to, to address some of their needs and, and in, in a safe way too. >>So, um, I, I look forward to working with Alec and his team over this coming year. I think there is, uh, knowing Alex and, and the partnership and his readiness to be a client reference for us. You know, those are all great, um, recognition of how he partners with us. And we really value and appreciate, uh, the relationship that we have with blue cross blue shield, South Carolina and, and blue choice. Excellent. Daryl's right. The, the, the database we use already has some of that low value care measures baked into it. And so throughout 2020, I've worked with our analytic consulting team. Uh, it's under Daryl too, to talk about what's on the product product roadmap for adding to the cadre of live low value care measures inside advantage suite. Uh, so that's something that we'll actively be, um, uh, discussing because certainly, you know, we're, we're obviously not the only client only health plan clients. So there may be other plans that have priorities that very different made very differently than ours. Uh, so we want to give them what we're studying, what we're interested in, so they can just add it in to all their other client feedback, uh, for advantage suites, roadmap. Excellent. >>Look, my last question, Alex is how would you grade IBM, if you had to take a bundle of sort of attributes, you know, uh, delivery, uh, value for service relationship, uh, et cetera, how would you grade the job that IBM is doing? >>I, the thing that I enjoy most about working with IBM and Darryl specifically, is that they're always challenging us to look at different things. Um, things that sometimes we hadn't considered, because obviously it may be an issue for another health plan client or an employer client that they've got. Uh, they tell us, this is what we're seeing. You know, you should look at it. Uh, a lot of times they do some of the foundational work in producing a report to show us what they're seeing in our data that is similar to what is in some of their other clients data. So that's refreshing to be, uh, challenged by IBM to look at things that we may not be, uh, looking at, uh, or maybe missing, because we've got our eye on the ball on something else you >>Care to put a letter grade on that. >>Oh, definitely. Definitely. Thank you. >>Well, Darryl, congratulations, that says a lot and, uh, we have to leave it there and one at a time, but, but Daryl, anything that I didn't ask Alex, that you, you wanted me to, >>So, um, Alex re able to keep your tennis game up during the pandemic? Uh, I, yes, I tried as, as often as my wife would let me good. I would play every time I was asked, but, uh, yeah, so I, I did have to temper it a little bit, although when you spend all day with her and, and my son, you know, she may be a little more, uh, lenient on letting me leave the house. Well, maybe she's >>Yeah. The tribute to the late great comedian Mitch Hedberg, who says, uh, you know, when I, I played tennis, I played against the wall walls. Really good, hard to beat if it's pandemic appropriate. >>Oh, that's good. That's a true statement. And there was a lot of that going on, a lot of that play and playing against the wall. >>Hey, thanks so much, stay safe and really appreciate the time. Thank you. >>Thank you. Thank you. You're >>Really welcome. It was a great conversation and thank you for watching and spending some time with client conversations with IBM Watson health.

>> Narrator: From the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley it's the Cube, covering food I.T., fork to farm, brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with The Cube. We're at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, at the Food I.T. show. About 350 people from academe, from food producers, somebody came all the way from New Zealand for this show. A lot of tech, big companies and start-ups talking about applying IT to food, everything from ag to consumption to your home kitchen to what do you do with the scraps that we all throw away. We're excited now to get to the "Big Brain" segment. We've got our Ph.D.s on here. We're excited to have Doctor Glenda Humiston. She's the V.P. of agriculture and natural resources for the University of California. Welcome. And also, Doctor Helene Dillard. She's the dean of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at UC Davis. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> So first off, we were talking a little bit before we turned the cameras on. Neither of you have been to this event before. Just kind of your impressions of the event in general? >> Glenda: I love seeing the mix of the folks here as you were saying in your intro. There's quite a diverse array of people, and I personally believe that's what's really going to help us find solutions moving forward, that cross-pollination. >> Helene: And I've enjoyed it, just seeing all the different people that are here, but then the interaction with the audience was very uniquely done, and I just think that's a real big positive for the show. >> So you guys were on a panel earlier today, and I thought one of the really interesting topics that came up on that panel was, what is good tech? You know, everybody wants it all, but unfortunately there's no free lunch, right? Something we all learned as kids. There's always a trade-off, and so people want perfect, organic, this-free, that-free, cage-free, at the same time they want it to look beautiful, be economical and delivered to their door on Amazon Prime within two hours. So it's interesting when we think of the trade-offs that we have to make in the food industry to kind of hit all these pieces, or can we hit all these pieces or how does stuff get prioritized? >> Well I think that for us, it's going to be a balance, and trying to figure out how do you provide the needs for all these different audiences and all the different things that they want and I don't think one farmer can do it for all these different groups that have different demands on what they're looking for. And some of the tradeoffs could be, as we go away from pesticides and from other things, we might have more blemishes. And those are still edible pieces of fruit and vegetables, it's just that maybe it's curly, maybe the carrot's not straight, you know, maybe it's forked, but it's still very edible. And so I think that we have to do a lot more to help educate consumers, help people understand that it doesn't have to look perfect to give you perfect nutrition. >> Right, right. >> Glenda: Yeah, yeah, Helene is absolutely right. Some of it's just education, but some of it's also us finding the new technology that is acceptable to the public. Part of the problem is we sometimes have researchers working on their own, trying to find the best solution to a problem and we're not socializing that with the public as we're moving forward. So then all of a sudden, here's this new type of technology and they're like, where did this come from? What does it mean to me? Do I need to worry about it? And that's one reason--we talked earlier on the panel too, about the need to really engage more of our citizens in the scientific process itself, and really start dealing with that scientific illiteracy that's out there. >> Because there was a lot of talk about transparency in the conversation-- >> Yes. >> Earlier today about what is transparency. Cause you always think about people complaining about genetically modified foods. Well what is genetically modified? Well, all you have to do is look at the picture of the first apple ever, and it was a tiny little nasty-looking thing that nobody would want to eat compared to what we see at the grocery store today. A different type of genetic modification, but still, you don't plant the ugly one, and you plant the ones that are bigger and have more fruit. Guess what, the next round has more fruit. So it does seem like a big education problem. >> It is, and yet, for the average human being out there, all you have to do is look at a chihuahua next to a Saint Bernard. None of that was done with a genetically modified technology and yet people just--they forget that we've been doing this for thousands of years. >> Jeffrey: Right, right. You talked about, Glenda, the VINE earlier on in the panel. What is the VINE? What's the VINE all about? >> Well, it's brand new. It's still getting rolled out. In fact, we announced it today. It's the Verde Innovation Network for Entrepreneurship. You know, you've got to think of a clever way to get that acronym in there >> Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? >> Basically it's our intent from University of California to catalyze regional innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems. Part of what's driving that is we've got a fairly good amount of resources scattered around the state, even in some of our rural areas, on small business development centers, our community colleges, our county cooperative extension offices, and a host of other resources including lately, the last several years, incubators, accelerators, maker's labs. But they don't talk to each other, they don't work together. So we're trying to go in, region by region, and catalyze a coalition so that we can make sure that our innovators, our inventors out there, are able to go from idea to commercialization with all the support they need. Via just basic legal advice, on should they be patenting something. Access to people to discuss finances, access to people that can help them with business plans. Opportunities to partner with the University in joint research projects. Whatever it takes, make sure that for anybody in California they can access that kind of support. >> That's interesting. Obviously at Haas, and at Stanford, not far from here, you know, a lot of the technologies of such companies come out of, you know, kind of an entrepreneurial spin with a business-focused grad and often a tech grad in a tech world. You know, ton of stuff at Berkeley on that, but >> Yeah, but those folks this is really for ag >> are in urban areas >> If you're in a large urban area or you're near a major campus you've probably got access to most of that. If you're in agriculture, natural resources, and in particular, our more remote, rural communities, you typically have no access, or very little. >> Right. So biggest question is, Helene, so you're at Davis, right, obviously known as one of the top agricultural-focused schools certainly in the UC system, if not in the world. I mean, how is the role of academic institutions evolving in this space, as we move forward? >> I would say it's evolving in that we're getting more entrepreneurship on campus. So professors are being encouraged to look at what they're working on and see if there's patent potential for this. And also, we have a group on UC Davis campus called Innovation Access, but looking at how can they access this population of people with money and, you know, the startups to help them bring their thing to market? So that's becoming-- that's a very different campus than years ago. I think the other thing is, we're also encouraging our students to look at innovation. And so we have a competition called the Big Bang, and students participate in that. They do Hag-a-thon, they do all these kinds of things that we tend to think that only the adults are doing those but now the students are doing them as well. And so we're trying to push that entrepreneurship spirit out onto all of our campus, onto everyone on the campus. >> And I do want to emphasize that this isn't just for our students or our faculty. One of the key focuses of the VINE is all of our external partners, too. Just the farmers, the landowners, the average citizens we're working with out there. If they've got a great idea, we'd like to help them. >> Jeffrey: And what's nice about tech is, you know, tech is a vehicle you can change the world without having a big company. And I would imagine that ag is kind of-- big ag rolled up a lot of the smaller, midsize things, and there probably didn't feel like there was an opportunity that you could have this huge impact. But as we know, sitting across the street from Google, that via software and technology, you can have a huge impact far beyond the size and scope of your company. And I would imagine that this is a theme that you guys are playing off of pretty aggressively. >> Absolutely. I think that there are people on campus that are looking for small farm answers and mechanization as well as large farm answers. We have people that are working overseas in developing countries with really, really small farm answers. We have people that are working with the Driscolls and partnering up with some of these other big companies. >> We talked a little bit before we went on air about kind of the challenges of an academic institution, with some of the resources and scale. These are big, complicated problems. I mean, obviously water is kind of the elephant in the room at this conference, and it's not being talked about specifically I think they've got other water shows. Just drive up and down the valley by Turlock and Merced and you can see the signs. We want the water for the farms, not for the salmon in the streams, so where do the--the environmental impacts. So these are big, hairy problems. These are not simple solutions. So it does take a lot of the systems approach to think through, what are the tradeoffs of a free lunch? >> It really does take a systems approach, and that's one thing here in California, we're doing some very innovative work on. A great example that both UC Davis, my division, and other parts of the UC system are working on is Central Valley AgPlus Food and Beverage Manufacturing Consortium, which is 28 counties, the central valley and up into the Sierra. And what's exciting about it is, it is taking that holistic approach. It's looking at bringing around the table the folks from research and development, workforce, trained workforce, adequate infrastructure, financing, access to capital, supply chain infrastructure, and having them actually work together to decide what's needed, and leverage each other's resources. And I think that offers a lot of possibility moving forward. >> And I would say that at least in our college, and I would call the whole UC Davis, there's a lot of integration of that whole agriculture environmental space. So we've been working with the rice farmers on when can you flood the rice fields so that there's landing places for the migrating birds? Cause this is the Pacific flyway. And can we grow baby salmonids in that ricewater and then put them back in the bay? And they figured out a way to do that, and have it actually be like a fish hatchery, only even better, because we're not feeding them little tiny pellets, they're actually eating real food, (laughs) whole foods. >> And how has an evolution changed from, again, this is no different than anyplace else, an old school intuition, the way we've always done it versus really a more data driven, scientific approach where people are starting to realize there's a lot of data out there, we've got all this cool technology with the sensors and the cloud and edge computing and drones and a whole lot of ways to collect data in ways that we couldn't do before and analyze it in ways that we couldn't do before to start to change behavior, and be more data-driven as opposed to more intuition driven. >> I would say that what we're seeing is as this data starts to come in precision gets better. And so now that we understand that this corner of the field needs more water than the other side, we don't have to flood the whole thing all at once. You can start on the dry side and work over to the other side. So I think the precision is getting much, much better. And so with that precision comes water efficiency, chemical efficiency, so to me it's just getting better every time. >> And frankly, we're just at the beginning of that. We're just starting to really use drones extensively to gather that type of data. New ways of using satellite imagery, new way of using soil sensors. But one of the problems, one of the big challenges we have, back to infrastructure, is in many parts of your agricultural areas, access to the internet. That pipeline, broadband. If you've got thousand of sensors zapping information back you can fill up that pipeline pretty fast. It becomes a problem. >> Jeffrey: That pesky soft underbelly of the cloud, right? You've got to be connected. Well, we're out of time, unfortunately. I want to give you the last word for people that aren't as familiar with this, basically, myself included, what would you like to share with people that could kind of raise their awareness of what's happening with technology and agriculture? >> Well, I guess that I would start out saying not to be afraid of it, and to look at the technology that has come. Remember when we had the rotary dial phone? My son doesn't even know what that is! (laughs) >> Jeffrey: Mom, why do you say dial them up? >> Yeah, why do you say dial people up? So I think, looking at your rotary phone, now, looking at your smart phone, which has more computing power than your first Macintosh. It's very--the world is changing, and so why do we expect agriculture to stay in the 1800s mindset? It's moving too, and it's growing too, and it's getting better just like that iPhone that you have in your hand. >> I think I would add that to that, back to the citizen science, I would love people out there, anybody, average citizens young or old to know that there's opportunities for them to engage. If they're concerned about the science or the technology come work with us! We have over twenty thousand volunteers in our programs right now. We will happily take more. And they will have a chance to see, up close and personal, what this technology is and what it can do for them. >> Alright. Well that's great advice. We're going to leave it there, and Dr. Humiston, Dr. Dillard, thank you for taking a few moments out of your day. I'm Jeffrey. You're watching the Cube. We're at the Computer History Museum. Food IT. Learning all about the IT transformation in the agriculture industry. Also to the kitchen, your kitchen, the kitchen of the local restaurant and all the stuff that can happen with those scraps that we throw away at the end of the day. Thanks for watching, and we'll be right back after this short break. (electronic music)

>>Live from Washington DC. It's the cube covering Boomi world 19 how to bide bullying. >>Welcome to the cue of the leader in live tech coverage. Lisa Martin with John furrier live at Boomi world 2019 in DC. John and I are pleased to welcome one of our next guests, Rajiv Ahuja managing director, Deloitte consulting. Rajiv welcome to theCUBE. Thank you Lisa. So just saw the news yesterday, a partner summit, Deloitte named the 2019 innovation partner of the year. Congratulations to Deloitte on that. >>Thank you very much. We are very proud and honored to be an innovation partner with Boomi Uh, it's been a great journey with boomi. >>You are worldwide partner of the year last year. Talk to us about the Deloitte Boomi partnership, the Alliance, all the good stuff that's going on there. >>imooBSo we've been a boomi partner for a number of years now and our partnership has grown leaps and bounds over this time. Uh, we picked up Boomi as a, as an Alliance partner as years back because of the strength of their product. Phenomenal innovative product, great I-PASS platform. Uh, we love booming because of not just the features of its platform and product, but also because of the fact that it's easy to implement for our clients. Uh, it, it, it's easy to implement, uh, from a business perspective. Um, beauty of the product is that it has a lot of prebuilt integrations that it provides to our, our partners. Uh, and, and, and as a, as an Alliance partner with them. Uh, it provides by this all that we need from, in terms of training, in terms of, uh, you know, sales opportunities that we worked together with them on. >>As a management consultant and a global system integrator. You guys are, you work with a lot of big customers with big problems, big projects, broken down into smaller projects. What's the landscape look like from a customer? Digital transformation has been talked about for many, many years. People process technology. Why is Boomi doing so well? What's the, what's their secret sauce and what are the customers liking about booming? >>Excellent question. Um, so when we think about our clients right now, our clients are dealing with really business problems. They're talking about digital transformation. They're talking about, uh, cloud. They're talking about IoT, they're talking about, about, uh, how do we, how do they use AI? So those are the big problems that our clients are dealing with. Those are the big challenges and opportunities that declines have in front of them. And when our clients think of these, these opportunities and challenges are, there are three things that they need to deal with. They, they need to make sure that when they undertake these large transformations, they're able to easily integrate data that currently resides in a lot of their on-prim applications. In many of these transformation, the long pole in the tent happens to be the integration layer. That's what kind of holds back a lot of these transformation efforts. >>And Boomi is an excellent product to help them with that. A second area where clients kind of have to deal with Israeli, the speed of innovation. That's a big challenge that our clients have to deal with today. Uh, and, and, and, uh, you know, go another day is when you could bring out a new release of your product every three months, every six months. Our clients, customers, they need to see some new features every few weeks. And, and a large part about making change happen quickly is around being able to bring in the relevant data from your enterprise pretty quickly as well. And again, Boomi with its simplicity, uh, and providing an ability to simply integrate, uh, uh, products quickly. And you know, that helps with that agility as well as the speed of innovation or the number of projects increasing in companies. Because, you know, with data and agile application development, there's more projects happening. >>Do you see the numbers increasing? Can you share some insight into what that looked like? Is it a lot, is there order of magnitude? Is it changed? Is it the same game is 10, 15 years ago, but just broken down into smaller projects? One big project comes in. What's the, what's the, what's the project landscape like? >> So for us, uh, it's been, uh, a tremendous growth journey over the last 10 years. Okay. The number of projects, again driven by digital transformation efforts, cloud efforts, the number of projects, the kind of projects, the flavor of projects that is coming up. And the sheer volume of projects is around clients thinking about moving to SAS based application models, thinking about their digital transformation and then taking up more mobile as well as digital projects at this stage. Thinking about their, their uh, you know, big M and a deals at this stage. Uh, all these kind of changes within their environment and within their demands that their customers and the mining of them. That has really spiked up the level of number of projects that we see at the state. >>Are you seeing that in terms of the spike in projects similar between like an established business that might have all these silos of, of applications that don't connect versus like a, say a younger startup that might have a ton of data and they're trying to move so quickly? Are there the types of integration projects that they're needing to implement to transform? Pretty similar, >>so, so, eh, similar, but there are some unique characteristics for each of these. Uh, two uh, sort of buckets of clients I would say, or bucket of companies in a more traditional companies today. Really the need is around. Um, and I'll give you a few examples, right. Um, there is a big need among larger companies to, to move to cloud. A number of our clients have mandated that moving to cloud and taking their, their applications to the cloud is their priority number one. For a typical large sized company, their application landscape could be anywhere from about five to 600 applications in the ID portfolio to close to four to 5,000 applications. So if you look at that application landscape, the reality is that the push to the cloud at this moment of time across most of our clients, they have 15 20% of their applications in the cloud. They're using certain sass applications, they have their own custom applications that have been put on a cloud platform and then they still have a large proportion of their applications on prem as well. So that's the reality of application landscape. For our last scale clients and with this reality, the ability to integrate cloud to cloud applications, cloud two on-prem applications and on-prem to application on prem applications. That's, that's the key need for integration for our large scale clients. >>Reggie, I want to get your personal opinion on something. You've been in the industry for long time now. You seen many waves, maybe computer, client server, local area networking, inter networking, internet, web, web two. Dot. Oh, cloud cloud one. Dot. Oh, cloud 2.0 which we're in now. What is the big story in your mind, what's the most important story that in tech today in your mind and what's the most important story that isn't being told or isn't being shared? Talked enough about >>the, the big story that has been talked about and I mentioned earlier, right? Is, is multicloud that's the big story that kind of is on the surface. The big story is that ultimately everything has to be business driven. It's the customer that is demanding change from our clients. The customer is saying that they are, they want to just deal with mobile. The younger customer, which will be the customer for of tomorrow, they want to be mobile. Right? And our clients, whether it's financial services clients or retail clients or any clients, uh, in most of the industry, you know, that's where their mind is. They want to be mobile first. They want to be cloud first. So that's the big story that's being told. And every client across flawless, all all industries that we support, that's the same story that we hear at every line. Right? The second big story at our clients is, is that that, that the computational power as has gone has, has improved so much that IOT connections with IOT, that's reality now that is coming reality, that's becoming reality. The third big story at our clients is that the traditional on prem applications that run the core guts of our clients, they haven't gone away. They're here to stay for some time. Most of our clients want to transform their core applications, but, but they haven't yet spend the money to, to transform them, >>you know, and great perspective. Thank you for sharing that insight. Uh, one of the interesting things about cloud 2.0 I'm calling it cloud 2.0 cause we were kind of in cloud 2.0 world cloud one. Dot. O was compute storage scale up Amazon born in the cloud API APIs, agile grade cloud, cheap windows enterprise is hard. Multicloud hybrid cloud Coobernetti's containers, legacy infrastructure sins you mentioned. But one thing that's interesting and I'd like to get your thoughts on is that network management used to be a small white space. Then that turned into observability companies going public great solutions. So observability is now a big category. Automation is taking configuration management and turning that into a whole category around automation. Automation is a really big hot trend right now that's ultimately a data driven business driven opportunity. So observability automation, these are tell signs for cloud 2.0 what is your view on this? Someone who's been in the industry for while talking to customers as they start to think about standing up IOT or scaling up mobile automation's important. Data's important. What's your >>no, absolutely. At the end of the day it's all about data. At the end of the day, uh, when we talk about automation, right, and we're talking about end devices, we're talking about connectivity with the end devices, we're talking about our IOT and those connectivity. But at the end of the day, the heart of it is integration and bringing data that is residing either on prem, in core systems that you have all on the cloud in the courses from that you have, how do you bring that data at the forefront of your edge? A second key aspect around around cloud to auto is it's an ecosystem. Basically. It's an ecosystem place based basically not just in terms of sharing data within your walls and sharing data with your own ecosystem partners, but it's an ecosystem based play in cloud to Datto in terms of also utilizing what your ecosystem provides. So today there is really no need for a lot of our partners to kind of do a lot of lot of their compute inside. You know, when you think about AI, a lot of gold is available in the market today that you can leverage with your ecosystem players. So ecosystem players. Also another interesting aspect about cloud dude auto that often gets old. >>You talked a minute ago about you know, the, the need to have cloud to on prem integration on prem to on-prem, et cetera. And one of the things that I was reading about Boomi is, well, iPads used to be all about 10 years ago connecting on prem, sorry, the cloud to on-prem. Now it's any data source anywhere, any integration edge. You talked about that we have this as consumers, we have this demand to have everything mobile, right? Whenever, whatever it is that we want to call an Uber or maybe a CFO needs to procure some software. What, how does that influence Dillard's go to market strategy with Boomi knowing that booby is integrating on prem cloud edge? All of it? >>So great question. Uh, there are, there are really freaky, um, kind of opportunities that we see when we implement with our clients. Uh, the first big opportunity that we see is when our clients are, are taking a journey to the cloud. Uh, let's say many of our clients want to implement core SAS solution. They're implementing a net net suite solution, they're thinking of SAP S four HANA implementation on the cloud. They're thinking of both the implementation on the cloud, right? With any large SAS platform implementation, there is always need for connectivity to on-prem applications, other SAS applications at times two end devices, right? That's the point where we see a lot of our projects. That's the point where we see a lot of opportunity to help our clients using Boomi as an integration platform. Right? A second big area where we see, uh, our clients needing help is when in their life cycle there is a big event, for example, a big MNA deal, a big divestiture that that might be planning product launch or something significant, something significant. >>And at that point of time, for example, a typical divestiture deal, typically the company that is being so love at times as a part of the deal, the expectation from the buyer is that the core ID infrastructure that they're buying from the company would also be transformed as a part of the deal. And when that's the case and we have a number of examples of those where where you know as a part of the deal itself, the seller tries to modernize it infrastructure and the first thing they do is they go for a plethora of SAS applications to replace their core legacy applications and they want to integrate them very quickly. And that's another situation where we've seen a product like Boomi being very successful in helping us implement. So those are the two big use cases. And the third one is as obviously as you talked about around digital transformation, so driven by digital transformation, whether it's mobile alone or mobile along with transformations along with gain of some edge computational transformation. That's a situation where again, you know they're there, they're leading a large transformation within their organization. And a part of that is answer is making sure that from an integration perspective they standardize and that's where Boomi comes into a lot, a lot of picture as well. >>Well where do you have tons of opportunity? Tons of momentum. Thank you for joining John and me on the QB day, sharing what Deloitte and Boomi are doing together. And again, congratulations to Deloitte on the partner of innovation partner of the year. Thank you so much. Pleasure to talk with you for Regina and John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from Boomi world 19 thanks for watching. Thank you very much.